January 2005 Archives

American biased (you can only do 2 year or 4 year degrees) but kind of amusing.

To counterbalance my enthusiasm of the other night...

A certain friend - he knows who he is -  linked to Apple Haters Unite [at Gizmodo] which is pretty funny - although not necessarily for the same reasons that the original author probably thinks it is.

What he didn't mention was that that was a rebuttal to the even funnier Apple iProduct announcement [also at Gizmodo]. The original home of this also has the trailing pseudo-disclaimer:

"iFanatics, please take note: I'm not making fun of Apple products, I'm making fun of you."

Also worthy of note was the Alternative Apple Store.

Joe is quite keen on getting ourselves a windmill. It looks interesting - they reckon it pays for itself in 5 years. It would be quite cool to have though.

If we're going to get environmental though I suggested we switch to an environmentally friendly electricity supplier first.

The Guardian also host a comparison utility.

Both the above comparison utilities give an option to go for green tariffs.

More info: Friends of the Earth have a comparison table. This also explains why buying green electricity may not actually be doing anything useful at all.

How can you tell it's green?

Every unit of green electricity generated comes with a certificate of proof that it is green. Companies use the proof to demonstrate to the Government they have met their legal obligation.

Some companies keep the certificates for the extra green electricity they have supplied to you.

Others sell the certificates to other electricity companies which can then use them to meet their legal obligations.

The survey information is also available as a PDF download which goes into more detail and is worth reading unless you know how the energy market works already.

So comparing the two recommended options the FoE gives that are actually available we get:

• Good Energy: 10.2p/day + 7.1p/kWh. Discounts for advance DD payment of £10 (monthly), 4.25% (quarterly), 5.5% (half-yearly), 8% (annual). Not clear whether this includes VAT or not.
  
• Green Energy 100: 4p/day + 7.64p/kWh. plus VAT. Monthly DD only. Free shares given.
  

Current Expenditure, including VAT:

Electricity (Powergen) £390 by monthly DD. Total of 4452 units.
Gas (BG) £397.31 by monthly DD. Total of 23432 kWh.

Finally managed to get the Vaio Media server on my laptop to work with the software I work on - ANT PurePlay. Everything pointed to it just being another UPnP AV media server but it didn't seem to show up with any of the usual tools. Turned out to be my firewall blocking all the broadcasts - even when both applications were running on the one machine, Thumbnails don't show up though. But the only reference I can find to the problem is here. I probably need to understand the software better before I can make use of that info though.

I have to confess the new Mini Mac is kind of tempting - just from a new gadget point of view. However if I had one I'd have to spend a lot of time getting to know it and getting a development environment up and running and all the rest. And then I'd just have the problems of keeping 4 machines in sync and trying to decide where stuff like photos should live.

Still, sofware like this does add to the temptation. If it is as good as it says then it really is the answer to what I've been trying to do with DVD Profiler and Book Collection - and I haven't even found a decent CD cataloguer yet. Decent means one that will work from barcodes - putting each CD in the drive - again - and waiting for a CDDB lookup is not good enough.

A little bit of shopping this afternoon. I needed a USB wireless adaptor for Ferdinand, the Win XP Shuttle machine. I had originally bought Shuttle's own internal wireless card - but that never worked - so for a while I used the Linux shuttle (Gonzalo is you must know) as a router to the main network via a cross-over cable.

This worked OK but meant I couldn't use Remote Desktop or Samba to Ferdinand which was irritating. Then the ethernet port on Gonzalo failed so I had no choice but to get Ferdinand its own connection. A trip to PC world and I picked up a DLink 802.11G USB stick for 30 quid. It also came with a handy little extender cable and stand - in effect acting as its own aerial. This will hopefully stop it suffering from Gonzalo's problem where the wireless link quality just drops to 0 for no apparent reason.

Gonzalo's other problem is that ever since I upgraded the hard disc it's been crashing every week or two - usually with an I/O error if any reason is given at all. I ended up with a 160Mb drive with an 8Mb buffer because due to some strange offer they had on only the 80Mb drives were actually cheaper. Again I pondered SATA but decided against since they are still more expensive and I'm not confident about Linux's abiilty to handle them right now.

Spamalot looks very promising indeed. Of course, even assuming it's a success, it'll take years to get to the West End (just look at The Producers) and it won't have the cast it's got in the US.

Looks like they might have nicked songs from the other fiilms though - unless it's just for the website.

Hmm, still not updating much. OK so going to try a new tack here. I'll take a leaf out of Warren Ellis's book/blog and use this to store stuff I come across I might want to remember later - and if it is of no interest to anyone else then tough.

BTW If Ellis's blog entry ever says Do Not Click then you really, really don't want to click on it. My curiosity got the better of me once and I still find the image comes back to me now and again - mostly when I see a Do Not Click link on Warren Ellis's blog. If you are still curious - let's just say it involved poo and leave it at that.

So stuff I came across today:

• Engadget's list of things they've seen at CES. They haven't found us yet though.

• Free MP3s! Only of interest if you are a Slowdive fan though. Kind of ambient, trippy, guitar based, feedbacky stuff. A Slowdive Discography is also available.

• Electronic Scheme. More electronic music downloads. Haven't tried it out yet - but looks like it might be interesting.

• FFMPEG. Open source audio/video codecs. Looks like pretty much the only source of free versions of many decoders (such as MPEG4 based ones). It's LGPL so is only of partial use for us at work - but for any embedded-linux based targets it could be a good solution. The hassle involved in getting licenses for the patented items probably makes it easier to just license a commercial decoder for real distribution but it could be worthwhile as a starter or for demos.

• 24 Day 4 starts tonight in the US with a double episode followed by another double episode tomorrow and then an unbroken run till the end of the season. We'll be following along not far behind as the first episode is on Sky One on 30th Jan. I don't know whether it's a double or not though.

• House of Cuss - the Pipe. Can't remember how I came to this site but it has pointers to interesting MP3's on the web (such as the Slowdive stuff mentioned above).

• The Abduction Of The Art Of Noise. Might be worth picking up at some point.